James Naismith - Google Recognises Basketball Inventor

The Canadian-American who invented the game of basketball, James Naismith was celebrated with a Google Doodle on Friday.

Naismith invented the sport in 1891 near the town of Almonte in Ontario, Canada.

He was born on November 6, 1861 in Ontario, Canada, Naismith showed an interest in sports and physical education.

It is only ironic that he died in the same month that he was born which is 28 November 1939.

He didn't invent the game in Ontario, that would come when he was a physical education teacher at what is now Springfield College in Massachusetts.

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The interest carried him to college at McGill University, where he received a bachelor’s degree in physical education in 1888, and where he would also begin his career as a physical education teacher.

Naismith’s career eventually led to his move to the United States, where he took a job at the YMCA International Training College in Springfield, Massachusetts.

According to the Google Doodle, it was in Massachusetts where Naismith would invent the rules of basketball in 1891 after he was tasked with creating an indoor game to keep students occupied during the winter months.

Naismith was in New York to attend a basketball doubleheader at Madison Square Garden, 48 years after he created the very game that he was watching.

His invention, known at the time as basket ball, included features of soccer, football and hockey, and rugby and consisted of two teams of nine.

The game, introduced to his students on 21 December, proved popular immediately, with Naismith publishing the original rules of the game a year later in “The Triangle”, a college newspaper.

Naismith said it all began in the winter of 1891 when he was a physical education teacher.

"We had a real New England blizzard," Naismith said. "For days, the students couldn't go outdoors, so they began roughhousing in the halls. We tried everything to keep them quiet. We tried playing a modified form of football in the gymnasium, but they got bored with that. Something had to be done."

Then one day, Naismith got an idea. At each end of the gym, Naismith nailed up two peach baskets. He called the students to the gym and split them into teams of nine and gave them an old soccer ball and told them the idea was to throw the ball into the opposing team's peach basket.

"I blew a whistle, and the first game of basketball began," Naismith said.

However, there was a major problem. Naismith didn't have enough rules for his new game, and he said that's where he made his big mistake.

"The boys began tackling, kicking and punching in the clinches," Naismith said. "They ended up in a free-for-all in the middle of the gym floor. Before I could pull them apart, one boy was knocked out, several of them had black eyes, and one had a dislocated shoulder. It certainly was murder."

But the students nagged at Naismith to let them play again. So he made up some more rules, which included one that he deemed the most important: no running with the ball.

"That stopped tackling and slugging," Naismith said. "We tried out the game with those rules, and we didn't have one casualty. We had a fine, clean sport."

Naismith went on to earn his medical degree and was hired by Kansas in 1898. He was KU's first athletic director and was the school's first basketball coach (1899-1907).

Naismith died in his Lawrence, Kansas home nine days after suffering a severe brain haemorrhage

After his death in 1939, the popularity of basketball only grew, with the sale of the pages he wrote the original 13 basketball rules on in 1891 selling for $4.3m in December 2010 just one testament to his lasting legacy.